Twinity Beta
I am on Twinity Private beta and I would like to share impressions and hints with other people doing the same thing. Anybody out there? :-)
I'll break the ice with my first impressions.
I want to say immediately that it was a so-so impression. Probably because I was expecting a beta, while I think they are still in alpha. Very few features are already available. You can just walk around, sit on some, not all, chairs and place object that you can buy from a quite understandably limited choice. That's more or less all you can do now.
You can place "pictures" containing, well... pictures, but they can also be configured as mirrors or, and this is quite a nice feature, web browsers.
Mirrors are cool, but they still need refiniment. For example, I placed a mirror just in front of my pool and water surface is not reflected, but all that you can see is the bottom of the pool itself.
The browser is a very nice feature. You can point it at the url of your choice and then browse the site. Links work. I had not the time for checking whether things like movies or java applets or Flash work. I'll check next time.
The avatar building functions are quite good. Very like Second Life and as much as effective.
You can use voice to chat and that's great too.
But there are many things that I don't like too.
The standard blue ligth is depressing. It makes everything look very sad. I had not the time to try, but I suppose that you can buy lights for your flat. But even in the places where I found additional lights every thing looked very cold and flat.
The overall impression is of a claustrophobic world. Being limited only inside building is not a pleasant sensation for someone who comes from Second Life or WoW for example. It gave me the sensation to be back about 5-6 years to old platforms.
My first contact with in-world support was all but satisfying, but I want to give them another chance before writing about it.
Documentation is almost totally absent. Links to Help are not working from inside the world and browsing the website all that you can find are a few hints about part of the functionalities available at this moment. Not very useful.
BTW, if you are going crazy to find some way to get back to the Lobby from a specific place, you have to click on the micro-icon on the top-right corner of the toolbar. I am dumb on many occasions, but I think that something a bit more noticeable would be better. Or at least it should be the first hint to give to the newbie when they come in.
I experienced several minor quirks and a couple of crashes, but the platform seemed to be stable enough.
I am quite worried about availability for other platform than Windows. During installation, I could see a Microsoft Visual C++ component installation. Should Twinity be a Windows-only product, I would consider it a no-no about its use. I use a Mac most of the time myself, but for sure I don't want to endorse platform-bound services on Internet. Even Mac only services :-)
At this point I could not find any element to check the most interesting (promised) features of Twinity: the economy and the tie with real-world location. I created my apartment in Rome, the city where I live, but to be honest it could be in Paris or Atlanta or Camberra. There is nothing distinguishing it as belonging to Rome if not a label. Probably this aspect will become more apparent in future.
Ok. I think it is enough for a first post. If somebody else is interested in Twinity we can start share more specific hints about the way it works.
I'll break the ice with my first impressions.
I want to say immediately that it was a so-so impression. Probably because I was expecting a beta, while I think they are still in alpha. Very few features are already available. You can just walk around, sit on some, not all, chairs and place object that you can buy from a quite understandably limited choice. That's more or less all you can do now.
You can place "pictures" containing, well... pictures, but they can also be configured as mirrors or, and this is quite a nice feature, web browsers.
Mirrors are cool, but they still need refiniment. For example, I placed a mirror just in front of my pool and water surface is not reflected, but all that you can see is the bottom of the pool itself.
The browser is a very nice feature. You can point it at the url of your choice and then browse the site. Links work. I had not the time for checking whether things like movies or java applets or Flash work. I'll check next time.
The avatar building functions are quite good. Very like Second Life and as much as effective.
You can use voice to chat and that's great too.
But there are many things that I don't like too.
The standard blue ligth is depressing. It makes everything look very sad. I had not the time to try, but I suppose that you can buy lights for your flat. But even in the places where I found additional lights every thing looked very cold and flat.
The overall impression is of a claustrophobic world. Being limited only inside building is not a pleasant sensation for someone who comes from Second Life or WoW for example. It gave me the sensation to be back about 5-6 years to old platforms.
My first contact with in-world support was all but satisfying, but I want to give them another chance before writing about it.
Documentation is almost totally absent. Links to Help are not working from inside the world and browsing the website all that you can find are a few hints about part of the functionalities available at this moment. Not very useful.
BTW, if you are going crazy to find some way to get back to the Lobby from a specific place, you have to click on the micro-icon on the top-right corner of the toolbar. I am dumb on many occasions, but I think that something a bit more noticeable would be better. Or at least it should be the first hint to give to the newbie when they come in.
I experienced several minor quirks and a couple of crashes, but the platform seemed to be stable enough.
I am quite worried about availability for other platform than Windows. During installation, I could see a Microsoft Visual C++ component installation. Should Twinity be a Windows-only product, I would consider it a no-no about its use. I use a Mac most of the time myself, but for sure I don't want to endorse platform-bound services on Internet. Even Mac only services :-)
At this point I could not find any element to check the most interesting (promised) features of Twinity: the economy and the tie with real-world location. I created my apartment in Rome, the city where I live, but to be honest it could be in Paris or Atlanta or Camberra. There is nothing distinguishing it as belonging to Rome if not a label. Probably this aspect will become more apparent in future.
Ok. I think it is enough for a first post. If somebody else is interested in Twinity we can start share more specific hints about the way it works.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by SuezanneCB-SuezanneC-Baskerville on
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First let's hope we didn't click without reading on a keep your mouth shut non-disclosure aggreement in the process of getting in the Twinity beta.
As mentioned elsewhere I had a hard time getting twinity downloaded. I don't know if that is my Comcast ISP giving me trouble about FTPing or what, but with some clues from Manon at Twinity support I did manage to get it to work.
Twinity textures are largely flat uniform colors on my system. This reduces the impact a lot. Is this how it looks for everyone?
One thing Second Life does pretty well in my view is the avatar movement and camera(not the standard walk animation) . The avatar's camera is attached to the pelvis and moves up and down like a person's viewpoint does. You can focus on things, which is really important for taking good pictures. Twinity, like Novoking, doesn't let you focus on things. This gets frustrating when you want to take a closeup, have your av offcenter, etc. The avatar walking in Twinity is pretty stiff.
I saw a web page on a wall with a video of some sort in Twinity. As the cursor moved over parts of the page the cursor changed, but clicking on what must have been a link or a button didn't seem to do anything.
Twinity is very slow in loading the list of places, so slow that I thought it was locked up.
Chat doesn't seem to be working very well. I could see my chat bubbles and my chat in the chat general window but the other party didn't seem to be able to
The Send Feedback failed twice.
I wasn't able to figure out how to add a person to be able to chat with them.
They might need to have a way for people to see that you don't use voice so they won't keep asking if you have a mike.
The reflections of avatars are nice. This will make guys wear mirror shoes.
The sunlight was too bright in a number of places.
It wouldn't do anything when I clicked on Make a Place.
They just added a new version on the 18th, in case anyone tried it before then and didn't know it changed a bit.
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Permalink Reply by Griffo Boffin on
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I think that Metaversum should only be happy to have people talking about Twinity and helping each other to better explore their world. And I think that a space like this one would be very useful to exchange hints given the actual lack of directions on their website.
Going to your comments:
>Twinity textures are largely flat uniform colors on my system. This reduces the impact a lot. Is this how it looks for everyone?
It is the same to me.
>Twinity, like Novoking, doesn't let you focus on things.
I agree with you that it is frustrating. You should send it as a feedback.
>Twinity is very slow in loading the list of places, so slow that I thought it was locked up.
It is the same to me. But I think it is quite natural on a prototypal setting like the actual one.
>I wasn't able to figure out how to add a person to be able to chat with them.
I crashed just before completing it, so I don't know if it works for real, but you should open the Chat Window, be lucky enough to guess the name of the person you would like to talk to (SL-like Search is a much needed feature here!), then you select his/her name and click on "Add a friend". That should be all. It is quite annoying that you can see the real name of people and not their nick. But Manon said this is something that should not be working this way.
>The sunlight was too bright in a number of places.
Where could you find sunlight? I could only find dark places. Maybe it is because I visited only european places at RL night. I have to check it.
>It wouldn't do anything when I clicked on Make a Place.
It worked like a charm to me.
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A little addendum: the Send Feedback failed for me too.
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Permalink Reply by Duder Pahute on -
Hi there,
We've been waiting for days for acces to the Twinity Beta. Are we missing something here? We'd love to take a peek inside. How long did you wait to get on board?
Thanks,
Duder
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I waited about one week. I guess I was lucky. Or maybe your application got lost. Try to resubmit.
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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Snyder on
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hi,
this is jeremy from metaversum, the company behind twinity. we do appreciate the feedback and no, there's no NDA being broken in this discussion here. :-)
i just wanted to take a second to reply to a few of the comments here.
@ griffo, @ suzanne - thanks for your feedback. we have taken that back to our development team. lighting has been a commonly mentioned thing, as well as the chat functionality not being perfect. the "send feedback" mechanism should be working again.
for the camera angle, it is possible to change focus, but within limits. for instance, you cannot send your camera far away from your avatar. however, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in on things that you want to see in more detail. try holding down the right-mouse button and moving the mouse to swivel the camera around. also, you can change the camera mode between first person and arcade. we've heard from a lot of people that they strongly prefer one mode or the other. try both and see which works best for you.
and we have updated our documentation more, and will continue to do so, naturally.
@ duder - please sign up at www.twinity.com. we are sending out invitations every one to two weeks, with a small break right at the moment.
thanks again for all your feedback!
- jeremy
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By changing the focus I mean clicking on a point and having that become the camera's focal point. Like Second Life lets you do by alt clicking on an object and mousing around.
I got to see a browser on the wall. I highlighted some text in the browser, did control c, alt tabbed to notepad, did control v, and the text from the Twinity inworld browser appeared in notepad. This is a good, useful thing.
I jumped off the balcony at one place and wandered around outside. I liked being able to be outside more than being inside.
I wonder iif one could use a web based Second Life client to chat with people in SL from within Twinity?
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So you can jailbreak from flats!
That's great! How could you jump off? I could not find a keyboard combo to jump.
On a different note: I tried to participate to yesterday's Christmas Party, but I kept hanging forever at "Connecting to the server..." screen. Anyone was more lucky than me?
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I'm not sure if the place I was at was the "official" christmas party place but it probably was. had Christmas in the name and christmas stuff. there were two other people there at the time so i think that qualified as a party.
At one point i went out on a balcony without realizing it and fell down into a place with just me and the sun. when i went back the door to the balcony was partly closed; I tried to go out anyway and got stuck. the owner moved the door. I went back on the balcony . There were two plants at different distances from the balcony wall. The taller plant was next to the balcony, the shorter plant a bit farther away. I was able to walk up to and on top of the shorter and then to the taller and then over the wall and down into the city.
My pictures are at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/connection-in-progress/sets/7215760351...t
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Permalink Reply by Prokofy on
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I went on the Twinity Beta and I was most impressed with the ease of sign-up and entry and visibility of places to go in world made by other people, all named after cities.
But...it doesn't let you know that when you sign up, using your real-life name, and also chose a "user name" that your real-life name is what will be generated for your avatar! That's unpleasant -- it really should warn you.
I also found it hugely frustrating a) not to be able to go outside b) not to be able to fly and c) not to be able to focus on objects by alt-left-mouse-click on any object I wished. Those three things are going to be deal-breakers for me on any other platform and keep me in Second Life happily. You don't appreciate little things like being able to put a focus on some element of your environment that you select, and being able to fly around and go *outdoors* until...it's taken away and you realize these three ingredients are the essential framework of Second Life that makes it free.
What I really liked about Twinity is the great care and attention put in to urging that people "be nice" and behave and treat others well, and also their consideration of economic and governance issues. Obviously, they've tried to learn from Second Life's mistakes. There are some typical game-god problems here, however, where they talk about intervening between customer disputes over who has rights to a property. Everyone wishes the Lindens would do that; when they see a game-god that isn't elected or accountable doing it, they may change their tune. It's not clear to me how these disputes would emerge, mechanically.
You do get some sort of right (that can be evoked) to a room or building that you can decorate and sell.
I notice everybody in this thread going on about the ability to have a browser inworld. This is something geeks constantly urge to be put in platforms as "doors" or "portals" or ways out of the space that they feel trapped in....because they can't a) walk outside and keep walking in a contiguous world b) fly around and have the world appear small when distant and large when up close; c) camera-zoom. See how that works? The Lindens solved that problem of freedom and scope by making a contiguous, streaming world, and then in other worlds, they solve it by these "doors" or having Internet browsers open. But...if I wanted to browse the Internet, I would browse the Internet, without dropping into a world. It's just not important to me to have browsers opening up, and yes, I realize all kinds of things like presentations or streaming data can be put in but again...if I wanted those, I'd go to some other site.
I fail to see why having the client only work on Windows is some kind of "no-no". Most of the world uses Windows. Macs and Linux are far less used. It's truly not the end of a world if it can't be made for a Mac.
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How do you put the browser on the wall?
I want to see if a web IRC client will let me connect to the #secondlife IRC group.
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To put a browser on the wall you have to:
1. Go near the place where you want to place your browser;
2. Right-click on the floor and select "Place object".
3. Choose one of the different kind of "Picture". I chose the "Big Picture".
4. Right-click on the "Picture" and select "Set canvas", then "URL";
5. Insert any URL you like;
6. If you need to move the Picture in place, click on it. A 3-axis movement tool will appear. Drag one axis to move along it. You can rotate along z axis too. If it is possible to rotate along different axis, I could not discover how.
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